CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The quarry was a great, festering wound in the earth, a place of violation where the land had been torn open and left to rot. The air was heavy with the stench of stagnant water and corruption. This was the place.
They arranged themselves at the quarry’s edge, a line of four against the encroaching dark. From somewhere further behind them, the colonel waited tensely with the horses.
“Now,” Darcy said, his voice low, “Let us begin.”
They closed their eyes. As one, with a synchronicity born of desperate hope, they reached inward for their own unique magic. Then, with a conscious act of will, of trust, of a wonderful faith, they opened it up to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth felt the powerful hum of their new accord as it formed within her, and Darcy’s hand in hers. His brief squeeze was not a question, but a request. A promise.
This would not be Buxton.
She looked at him, her own fear gone, replaced by an overwhelming faith in him — and in herself. With a small nod, she answered his unspoken command and opened up everything she had, everything she felt from Georgiana, from Wickham, from her own immense wellspring of power.
Power erupted from around them, a great swirling fusion of their four energies.
Elizabeth felt Georgiana’s healing light against the raw intensity of her own elemental power.
She felt Wickham’s earth magic, connecting her to the depths of the land.
And she felt Darcy’s magic, a vast, encompassing framework of pure will, gathering their energies and shaping them.
Their woven light poured into the corrupted earth, and the dark tethers strangling the node and the line snapped with a series of sharp, almost percussive cracks, like dry branches breaking in a fire.
The Blight unleashed its brute fury and met force with force.
The earth beneath them began to churn. Wickham, panicked, shouted, “It will be an assault from the ground!”
Shards of rock, coated in a greasy black corruption, shot from the quarry.
They launched themselves in a directed volley, whistling through the air towards them.
Wickham instinctively stomped his foot, and a crude wall rose up from the fissured earth, absorbing the first few projectiles with loud thuds.
But it was not enough; the wall crumbled under the relentless assault.
“Disregard the wall! Target the quarry,” Darcy ordered.
Wickham, reacting instantly to the order, drove his foot down again.
A burst of his power tore through the quarry walls, sending the Blight's attack into disarray. Then he answered with a volley of his own, hurling stones through the air. The noise was deafening; rocks split around them and send shards flying. Georgiana’s shriek was lost in the roar.
A wave of frost swept from her. The flying shards were coated in a sudden, thick layer of rime, their momentum stolen as they fell harmlessly to the ground.
Darcy thrust a shimmering wall of light before them, deflecting the rest of the barrage. Each impact, however, left a smear of oily residue on the shield, a corruption that seemed to melt the shield where it touched.
“It is trying to poison the shield!” Elizabeth cried, feeling the integrity of Darcy’s shield strain under the repeated, tainted blows. She lent her magic to it, reinforcing.
The Blight shifted its attack. The stagnant water in the deepest parts of the quarry began to roil. It was not a wave, but dozens of thick tendrils of sludge that rose up like snakes, smelling of the grave. They slithered towards Georgiana.
Georgiana cried out, revulsion and fear in her eyes, but she held her ground.
Ice pulsed from her, meeting the advancing sludge.
The two forces met with a hissing sizzle.
The sludge recoiled where her frost touched it, but it did not retreat.
Elizabeth summoned fistfuls of fire, sending them flying from her palm.
Yet her flames only scorched the surface of the foul ooze, doing little to halt its advance.
“Cover me,” Darcy commanded. His focus shifted from the shield, as Wickham and Elizabeth concentrated their efforts on defending with rock and flame.
Pure cold, a will made manifest as ice, radiated from him. The black tendrils hissed, and then froze solid with a crack that echoed across the quarry. What had been a slow moving horror was now a grotesque forest of black ice, its grasping limbs frozen mid-reach.
But the Blight was cunning, twisting even his victory into a new peril. The ice began to groan, vibrating with the trapped energy within it. Cracks spiderwebbed across its surface.
“Darcy, it will shatter!” the colonel yelled from somewhere sounding far away, his soldier’s instinct recognising an explosive device.
A tremor ran through the black ice, a low groan promising a violent, shrapnel-filled explosion. But before it could detonate, Darcy’s focus narrowed with terrifying precision. He made a sharp, clenching gesture with his free hand.
“No, it will not,” he gritted out.
The groaning of the ice abruptly ceased.
Instead of exploding outwards, the entire grotesque forest of frozen sludge collapsed inwards upon itself with a crushing sound.
The volatile energy, contained and denied its release, was turned back on its source, imploding into a fine harmless powder that settled silently on the quarry floor.
The Blight summoned the air. A scouring gale, filled with the grit of pulverised stone, howled through the quarry.
Elizabeth felt her eyes tear and her lungs burn. The world became a maelstrom of screaming wind and stinging darkness. But through it all, she felt Darcy’s unwavering presence.
“Elizabeth!” His voice tore through the grit. “Give me your fire!”
She did not hesitate. She poured her fire into their bond and felt Darcy catch it, shape it.
His will became a vortex, a controlled whirlwind that spun around them in a circle, sucking the Blight’s toxic gale into its heart.
And there, it met Elizabeth’s incandescent flames. The firestorm incinerated the dust.
For a triumphant beat of a heart, there was silence. The elemental fury of the Blight was spent. The air around them seemed to hold its breath, filled with the scent of ozone and victory.
But it was a ruse.
While they had been occupied with its elemental assaults, the Blight had been at work upon a different, and far darker, purpose. Gathering. Siphoning power not from the corrupted ley line, but from the despair of Newcastle itself, from the city’s collective, festering sickness.
Now, the Blight unleashed it.
It was not a physical attack. It was a deluge of pure, concentrated non-existence. A crushing weight of utter, absolute hopelessness that slammed into their defences. It was the roar of a dozen, a hundred, a thousand souls giving up.
And the full brunt of that onslaught crashed squarely into Darcy.
Darcy’s shield, which had withstood rock and ice and wind, buckled under the soul-crushing despair, its golden light flickering and thinning. His protective fire-vortex collapsed, extinguished by a force that had no heat, no substance, only an all-consuming emptiness.
“Darcy!” Elizabeth’s horrified scream was torn from her throat, only to be dissolved into nothing. His face was a rigid landscape of horror, every muscle pulled taut. His gaze, though wide and staring, seemed to see nothing of the world before him.
She could feel the shield's integrity failing through their bond, the steady hum of his power breaking apart into erratic, disconnected pulses. The warmth of its protection was rapidly leaching away, replaced by the chill pressing in from all sides.
Then the shield shattered away completely.
“Darcy!”
Her call skittered across the surface of his consciousness, never piercing through. His gaze remained petrified, fixed on some point beyond her, lost to a vision she could not see.
Her world seemed to fall away, leaving only pure terror. She shouted again, her voice cracking, raw now with new desperation. “William! Focus on me!”
But still he did not seem to hear her. She tried to move towards him, to ground him with her touch, but the Blight would not allow it. A violent squall of icy wind tore between them.
Panic seized her. She threw her power at the barrier, a desperate blast of fire, but the icy gale smothered her flames before they could even form.
She tried again, attempting to shape the air, to create a counter-current, but her control, so painstakingly won in the quiet glades of Pemberley, was no match for this raw, vicious force.
Her magic was a desperate thing, lashing out without precision, dissipating uselessly against the Blight’s focused assault.
She was a breath away from him, yet she could not reach him.
Through their bond, she felt a different kind of magic, a gentle, insistent persistence. Georgiana. She was pouring all her energy not into attacking the barrier, but into trying to calm the raging terror of Darcy's mind from within.
The infuriating futility of their efforts made a cry of frustration tear at Elizabeth's throat.
Georgiana was trying to heal, but the Blight's assault was too strong.
She needed an opening. Gritting her teeth, Elizabeth grasped the wind with her magic.
A gust, born of pure desperation, slammed into the Blight's icy gale.
It was a head-on collision. The two forces met in a shrieking vortex.
It was not enough. The barrier held.
Just as a fresh wave of helpless fear threatened to consume her, a presence registered on her magical senses — acute, focused, and shockingly close.
Wickham.
He stood on the other side of the windstorm, his greatcoat whipping around him, his body held with unnatural stillness.
Through the swirling vortex of ice and grit, Elizabeth saw something cross his features. It was an impulse, an ambition, a cold recognition. It was the look of a man who had coveted everything another possessed, and suddenly saw it all lying unguarded before him.
That look sent a primal chill down her spine, a blade of ice in her gut, sharp with the horrifying certainty that she had been almost laughably, spectacularly, monumentally wrong.
And then the air around him crackled, and she felt a violent thrum of raw magic begin to coalesce within her and around her. It was his power, gathering like a tidal wave before the crash.